The next two days of the Impact Challenge are devoted to being impactful in an indirect way: staying on top of your field, both the work of your fellow researchers and all the most relevant new work in your field. Staying on the cutting edge of your discipline can help you find unexpected opportunities for collaboration and spark your own creativity.

In today’s challenge, you’ll learn how discover your colleagues’ new publications, software, and more.

Tracking your colleagues’ new articles

You can use many of the same social networking platforms you’ve already signed up for to track the new work of your colleagues in your email inbox. Plus, the powers of PubMed and IFTTT can be combined to find publications that aren’t being shared elsewhere.

Academia.edu

Login to Academia.edu and search for a colleague:

On their profile, click the “Follow” button:

Now you’ll see their most recent updates in your homepage newsfeed whenever you login to Academia.edu.

To stay up to date via email–so you don’t have to login as often–you’ll need to update your email notifications settings. In the upper right hand corner of your screen, click the arrow next to your name, then navigate to Account Settings > Email Notifications. Under the Papers section, select “Someone I’m following adds a work” and click Save at the bottom of the screen:

ResearchGate

ResearchGate works similarly. Search for a colleague and select their profile:

On their profile page, click the “Follow” button:

Adjust your email settings by clicking the arrow next to your picture in the upper right-hand corner and navigating to Settings > Notifications. Under the Network section, select “Adds a publication to their profile” and “Uploads a publication full-text”:

Both ResearchGate and Academia.edu have a few drawbacks to them: they only work when your colleague adds an article to their profile themselves, so it won’t be a complete record of their recent publication history. And when you initially follow your colleague, they’ll get a notification–which could be uncomfortable in some contexts.

Google Scholar

To get email updates when a colleague adds a new work, first search for them in Google Scholar:

Next, select their profile from among the search results:

On their profile page, click the Follow button, input your email address, select “Follow new articles,” then click the “Create Alert” button:

PubMed & IFTTT

The search index PubMed (and its counterpart, Europe PubMed Central) is a fantastic, free place to find out all the new articles that have been published in the life sciences (and some other disciplines, too). By hooking it up with IFTTT, you can get an email whenever a colleague’s new article appears.

Logon to PubMed and click “Advanced” under the search box at the top of the page. Then, select “Author” from the drop-down box next to the top search box on the Advanced Search screen. If your colleague has a very common name, you can search by the more restrictive “Author Full” or “Author Identifier” options instead, and search by their complete name or ORCID identifier.

In the search box, type in your colleague’s name, last name first, and select their name from the auto-generated options:

Click Search and on the next screen, look at the results to verify that they’re accurate.

Assuming they are, your next step is to create an RSS feed for your colleague’s publications. This will update every time a new publication matches your colleague’s name.

Click the RSS icon under the search bar at the top of the screen, rename the feed if you want, then click “Create RSS”:

On the pop-up box that appears, click “XML” and on the next page of XML-formatted results, you’ll see the guts of your feed. What you’re going to use from this is the URL for your RSS feed, which appears in the address bar of your browser.

Now it’s time to set up IFTTT. Logon to IFTTT and click “Create Recipe”. Your “this” will be a feed. The trigger will be “New Feed Item.” Copy the PubMed RSS feed URL into the “Feed URL” box that appears. Your “that” will be an email. Select “Send me an email,” make any edits you want to the title of your email and the contents of your email body, and click “Create Action.”

Now, whenever a new item appears on the PubMed search, you’ll get an email update.

You might be wondering, “Why not create an alert using the NCBI interface?” Well, I haven’t had great experiences with that interface–notifications I’ve set up haven’t worked very well, and resetting lost passwords is difficult–and so I want to recommend a more elegant option for the purposes of this Challenge.

Tracking new software and presentations

You can also track others’ new software and presentations using GitHub and Slideshare.

GitHub & IFTTT

You can use GitHub’s newsfeed to receive an email whenever anyone you follows does anything on GitHub: makes changes to existing code, uploads new code, comments on others’ code, and so on.

First, you’ll need to follow your colleagues. Search for your colleagues from the “Search” bar at the top of your GitHub screen:

On their profiles, click the “Follow” button:

Once you’ve finished following your colleagues, on your GitHub homepage, you’ll now see a stream of updates:

Click “Subscribe to your news feed” to the right of the feed and you’ll be taken to the XML-encoded page for your entire feed. Use that feed URL to create a new email alert on IFTTT, following the directions from the PubMed & IFTTT hack above.

Now you’ll have a lot of information in your inbox. If you’d prefer to only follow updates for specific, existing projects, you can follow repositories instead.

Here’s how: find the repository you want to follow updates for on your colleague’s profile or by searching for it by name. On the repository page, click the “Watch” button in the upper right-hand corner:

Then, adjust your email settings to get notifications whenever that repository is updated. Click the gear “settings” icon in the upper right-hand corner of the page, then go to Notification Center. Check the “Email” box under the “Watching” section to get email updates.

Slideshare

To get updates when a colleague adds new presentations to Slideshare, first search for your colleague and select their profile:

On their profile homepage, click “Follow” on the left-hand side of the profile:

Next, you’ll update your email preferences so you can get an email whenever they add a new presentation. Go to Account Settings > Email and select “When someone I follow uploads a SlideShare”:

Limitations

Nearly all of these options for tracking your colleagues’ research outputs only work if they–and you–have claimed a profile on the sites we’ve recommended above (aside from PubMed). And some are less than enthusiastic about claiming their profiles on Academia.edu and ResearchGate, due to what some scholars have called their “spammy” emailing practices.

Another potential limitation: you’re potentially going to get a lot of emails with this method of tracking your colleagues. To get around these notifications clogging your inbox, I recommend setting up inbox filters to push these emails to a dedicated “Notifications” folder in your email. Here’s how to set up notifications for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.

Homework

Find and follow five of your colleagues and competitors on as many of the above sites as you can.

Tomorrow, we’ll broaden our scope to follow all new publications in your field, so you can find new publications and other scholarly outputs from both your colleagues and researchers you don’t yet know.